John Maginnis: Voucher lawsuit is gift to Jindal

Gov. Bobby Jindal may call the lawsuit brought by President Barack Obama's administration against the state's voucher program "cynical, immoral, hypocritical and more," but he's got to love the big guy for it. Had the U.S. Justice Department not intervened, Jindal's already embattled scholarship program may have shriveled and faded in years to come, under funding pressure from the Legislature and legal challenges from school boards and teacher unions. Instead, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder snatched it from oblivion with the high-profile lawsuit that the governor is turning into a higher-profile political issue.

State courts already had limited the future of vouchers in Louisiana with rulings that barred the use of public education dollars through the Minimum Foundation Program. Unable to get into the MFP piggy bank, Jindal had to scrape together $40 million in this budget to fund private school vouchers for 8,000 students, or about 1 percent of 700,000 public school students. Given those pressures, prospects for the future growth of the program were limited, as was its political value to Jindal, until the feds' legal threat arose.

How great an actual threat federal action poses is questionable. The Justice Department seeks to block only vouchers for 2014-15 that would negatively affect the racial balance in 22 school districts under desegregation orders. With the vast majority of vouchers going to African-American children in minority schools graded D or F, the feds could point to only a few instances of white children getting vouchers to leave majority black schools. Only 570 current vouchers are in question, or less than one-tenth of the students receiving scholarships. If the suit posed any problem for Jindal, it was that it was not that big a problem to make a good political issue out of, until he went to work on it.

The governor put his feud with the feds in the national spotlight by taking it to their home turf. In a speech last week to the National Press Club, only blocks away from the Justice Department, the governor accused the president of trapping poor students in failing schools in order to curry favor with the national teacher unions. "There's not a chance that the president or the attorney general would send their kids to these schools," he said.

Then, in a Washington Post op-ed piece, he used the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's speech to the March on Washington to turn the civil rights table on Obama by describing the suit as "a complete rejection of King's dream."

Republican heavy hitters rallied to the cause, with Speaker of the House John Boehner and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the leading GOP voice on education reform, joining Jindal in demanding that Justice drop its suit.

Oh, but not quite yet, for Jindal is not through with his counter-offensive. This week, he is spending $500,000 from his campaign account on a statewide television buy to drive his message home to anyone who has not heard it. The ad starts with a montage of the many recent national news clips of him speaking out against the suit. Then he says, "The federal government in Washington is out of control. Now they want to run our schools. The know-it-alls in Washington think they know better than Louisiana parents."

In the ad, Jindal also takes a quick snipe at Obamacare, in order to not miss out on that ongoing fight. But among Republicans, everybody and their doctors already are attacking the Affordable Care Act. On the voucher front, Jindal now stands out on the national stage.

That's ironic, for against the backdrop of the governor's record on education, vouchers hardly stand out. He has brought about more change by supporting the ongoing expansion of charter schools and by setting up a more rigorous teacher evaluation system. But plenty of Republican governors, even President Obama, favor those initiatives. On vouchers, though, the president and the governor strongly disagree. Now, the Obama administration has singled out Louisiana with its lawsuit, and Jindal has eagerly answered the challenge.

Recent polls have shown Jindal's approval ratings to be as low as Obama's are in Louisiana. The governor's call to arms against federal intervention, backed with a half million dollars in message ads, can only improve his standing with the voters. If he makes that work, the governor should thank Obama.

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John Maginnis: Voucher lawsuit is gift to Jindal

Gov. Bobby Jindal may call the lawsuit brought by President Barack Obama's administration against the state's voucher program '